When I graduated from college, my goal for my writing career was this: to make a living telling stories that I love. It seemed, at the time, like an impossible dream–something so far out of my reach that I couldn’t possibly achieve it without years and years of constantly frustrated effort.
Well, guess what? For the past six months or so, I’ve more or less been doing it. I live below the poverty line in a basement with two other guys, and I have to donate plasma to cover the difference in my expenses each month, but writing is my main gig and I’m making enough to pay all my bills with it. Barely.
There’s more to life than making a living, though, even doing something that you love. My current month-to-month lifestyle isn’t particularly well suited for anything except, well, living month-to-month. So I need to make some changes, and to do that, I first need to dream a little bigger:
A really good dream should be–or at least seem to be–a little bit impossible. That way, you don’t have to worry about achieving it too soon. At the same time, it shouldn’t be too impossible. If you can’t see myself ever achieving it, then what’s the point?
For example, one of my bucket list goals is to look down on this planet from space. With the awesome advances in spaceflight that companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic are making right now, I can totally see that happening in my lifetime. But setting foot on an alien world? Nah, I don’t think that’s in the cards for me.
(Then again, if we figure out how to live forever, maybe it could actually happen. Even just adding another 50 or 100 years to my life would probably let me live to see a permanent base on the Moon or Mars. So maybe impossible is actually better–I don’t know.)
A friend of mine is building a business that he hopes will one day make him a cool seven figures. His mom makes six figures, but her name is also on six mortgages, so she’s pretty much tied to her job. One of his big dreams is to pay off all those mortgages for her so that she can retire.
When that happens, he’s going to celebrate by getting a bunch of friends together on a road trip to Texas. We’ll take a big refrigerated meat truck down there and go wild boar hunting until it’s packed full of pork. Then we’ll come back to Utah and have the mother of all barbecues. 😀
That’s the kind of dream I need to shoot for: something specific and personal that sounds kind of crazy but is still just barely within reach. In other words, it should be something that’ll make a good story when I finally achieve it. Or maybe I won’t achieve it–maybe the dream itself be so awesome that just the act of striving for it will make all the difference. As David Gemmell once wrote:
May all your dreams come true save one, for what is life without a dream?
It’s going to take more than one blog post to figure this whole dream thing out, so I’ll just leave that here for now. It’s definitely going to be on my mind for the next little while. If you have any impossible dreams of your own, please do share!
